Mark Self Employed Invoice Made Easy

Spread out footer invoice

welcome back to the small business toolbox I'm Andy Mack and I've been self-employed for longer than I can remember on this channel we just have a little informal chat about well frankly stuff that you probably should have been taught at school but hopefully just a few bits and pieces that I've picked up over the years you can benefit from if you're just starting out in business so you've thought of an awesome business name you've registered for self-employment in the UK you've got yourself sorted with a business bank account well it's time to start doing some work and actually get paid some money and in order to get paid you're probably gonna have to generate your first invoice and that's what this video is all about I'm gonna try and explain what an invoice is how to make one a couple of different examples of stuff that you need to include in an invoice and later on in the video I'm gonna give you a little tip from my absolute favorite invoice numbering system which just will make your life so much easier for managing your invoices I'll tell you all about that later on but let's start with some of the basics first so an invoice this is kind of what an invoice looks like you can print one out and send it to your customers through the post or you can send them as a PDF electronically or however you want to do it there's lots of different ways of sending invoices to people and an invoice essentially fulfills two different roles it's a tax document and it's a legal document from a tax perspective it's required just to maintain your own accounts and if you ever get audited by HMRC then they might ask for a copy of all of the invoices that you've ever raised and from a legal perspective you're issuing a formal demand for payment from your customer so above all an invoice is essentially how you get paid when you're talking about billing your customer you're generally talking about giving them an invoice you do some work you issue an invoice you get paid for the work simple as that most invoices these days will be electronically generated but you can do paper invoices if you want the main thing is you need to keep a copy of every invoice that you've raised whether it's an electronic copy or a physical paper copy that's entirely up to you I'll just keep PDF copies of every invoice that I've raised and that seems to do the job now as a small business owner you're probably only going to be generating what three or four invoices a month maybe depends what you sell but if you're in those sort of volumes you really don't need to go overboard on fancy accounting software and stuff like that a simple spreadsheet like Excel should do the job perfectly well if you do generate...